I uploaded thousands of photos taken with a Kodak camera to my computer using the camera doc, and they used to all display fine on the Easyshare computer site. But several years ago they all suddenly had a crooked line through the center and when I click on any particular photo a message will display that the photo has been damaged. How can the entire collection of photos be damaged like this? I would have gotten another camera if I’d know that would happen.
edit: The thumbnails have a crooked line through them, and when I click on a thumbnail, I get the “damaged” message on a blank gray screen.
Sounds like a bad block (or blocks) on the disk.
Another reason why backups are so important.
Okay, but what do you mean by disk? I wasn’t using a physical disc.
I hate the term, but these photos are on the Cloud then?
Files in cloud storage need to be stored on something, and that will almost always be disk.
However this doesn’t sound like a disk failure. This is only the thumbnails, and not the proper photos?
Thumbnails are typically just low resolution JPEGs. It is very suspicious that each thumbnail is damaged in an identical manner. A disk error won’t do that. It sounds a lot more like a subtle incompatibility between the thumbnails JPEG format and the display software. Either could be slightly varying from the precise specification of the file format in some way, and thus the reader can’t quite get the display right. It could be as simple as a single bit that the reader expects to be zero, and the creator of the software that wrote the JPEGs saw as a “don’t care” value and set to a 1. Or a more subtle, but of much the same ilk, mismatch. You may well find that if you retrieve the thumbnail files, and try to display them with different viewing software they display fine, or possibly refuse to display at all.
It’s probably relevant that Eastman Kodak declared bankruptcy in 2012 and exited the consumer market. Kodak - Wikipedia
FWIW, their website discusses the OP’s error. I’m not claiming that their diagnosis is accurate though.
Tom’s Guide:
http://www.tomsguide.com/forum/237339-49-kodak-easyshare-thumbnails-show-deleted-photos-locate-thumbs
Ah, the above makes more sense. I hadn’t twigged that the thumbnails were displaying a default “broken link” form. This does look somewhat more grim.
I gather from all this that the pictures were always on the photographer’s own computer all along and never were uploaded to Kodak. So for the OP, they were either moved to another location (either on the hard disk or to external media) or the files or the disk itself have been damaged.
Discussion of Kodak’s demise:
It was pretty ugly.
Sad thing is I had a 2 megapixel Kodak digital camera made in the early 00’s and the pictures it produced were EXCELLENT, even compared to more modern 6-8 megapixel cameras.
I think it was probably the lens, or I don’t know what made it produce such good pics with a small file size but I had good memories of the company.
Two ideas.
Graphic Converter (Mac only, I believe)
If you can find the originals, try to import into Word, and save page as a JPEG.
To OP: try installing a free photo organizer on the computer. I particularly recommend Picasa. After you install it, it will automatically comb through your computer and show you all the photos it can find (organized chronologically).
If the pictures were merely moved or renamed, it should find them and let you access them. It’s also a better program in many ways than Kodak’s tools, although there will be a learning curve.
If that doesn’t work, that might indicate the files were deleted or damaged. That may not be recoverable, although there ARE programs to “recover deleted files” that might be able to recover some or all of them.